How Well Do Imaging & Cloud Companies Protect Your Privacy?

You invest more than just your photos when you use services like Dropbox or Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Sensitive data, such as your location, private communications and more, gets transmitted to third party servers every day.

Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation surveys key tech firms to judge just how diligently they safeguard your privacy. Companies are judged across five criteria: whether they follow industry-accepted best practices when it comes to privacy protection (i.e. do they require a warrant before handing over communications), whether they tell users about government data demands, whether they disclose policies on data retention, whether they discloses government content removal requests and whether they have a “pro-user” policy of no “backdoors” to allow government surveillance.

This year, several firms used heavily by the photo community earned five stars–a perfect score. Among them were Adobe, Apple, Dropbox, Yahoo! and WordPress.

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest didn’t fare as well though they still beat out Google, which is aggressively courting photographers with its new Google Photos storage service.

You can read the full report here or get the nickel version from the EFF’s graphic below.